April 12, 2009

Weekly update April 6-April 12

This week, the branch was augmented with the ability to fine-tune style module configuration at the render layer level. The immediate crashes caused by the modification have been corrected. In the process, the bug affecting the camera view transformation after a Freestyle render was removed.

After a study of Blender’s data structures, it seems that the view map cannot easily be made available as a render pass. This is a structural problem: the original GSoC 2008 proposal had supposed that Blender render passes were general enough to store any type of computed data. We now understand that render passes are containers of float arrays, which means we have to make a choice of either extending the definition of a render pass to support the view map, finding a workaround to present the view map at the node level without adding it at the render pass level, or dropping the idea of incorporating the view map in the compositor altogether. The final decision will rest with Ton and the core Blender developers.

Before moving on to the next milestone, we will first work on correcting little annoying bugs and adding minor features:

view map calculations sometimes make the program crash, when an orthographic camera is used.

strokes are rendered in random order, affecting the end result when they overlap. The stroke depth information should be able to correct the issue.

style module configuration cannot currently be saved to file.

The Milestones page was updated. If you have suggestions or requests for the branch, please let us know in the comments.

Let us move on to a test render of the week. Currently a splash screen contest for upcoming Blender 2.49 has been conducted. The following image is the raw render prepared for an entry by T.K. The strokes were drawn by slightly modified versions of qi0.py and external_contour.py, while the halftones were generated by a PyNode script. Encouraged Freestyle users are suggested to submit yours. The deadline is April 19!